2016 Photographic Retrospective

It’s been quite the year! We’ve been faced with unfathomable trial and seen astounding triumph. In the face of continued violence against black, brown, and trans people at the hands of police, the pollution of our planet, the heartbreaking war in Syria and so much more, people everywhere continue to rise with creative responses to these and all unnatural disasters that compound us. From the indigenous solidarity of Standing Rock to the success of our youth who sued the US government, holding them accountable to ensure the planet they inherit will be inhabitable, we’ve had incredible wins that cannot be underestimated. This year we got to rally against DAPL with the International Indigenous Youth Council and Rock Against the TTP withTalib Kweli, and saw a major victory when the power of the people shut it down! We hope that our work is a drop in an ocean of successes that will slowly over-write the future we are walking into.

We are excited to share with you some of the miracles and magic we’ve experienced in 2016 through photos and stories.

Thanks for being part of our journey!

We performed our biggest shows this year and got to share the stage with incredible people whom we deeply respect and admire. From a 2- week run at the Brooklyn Academy Music, to presenting at the United Nations (where we made the ambassador to Brazil cry!), to the Many Rivers To Cross Festival alongside John Legend, Maxwell, Carlos Santana, Estelle, T.I, Sweet Honey In the Rock, Macklemore, Common,, Aloe Blacc, and many more, we feel blessed to have traveled the country with our art as our medicine. We also had the incredible opportunity to close out the 2016Bioneers National Conference, delivering a keynote to 6,000 solutionaries,and were honored to receive the Bioneers Award for our 14 years of activism. We also had tremendous fun y’all, hitting up multiple stages with our dear friends from Nahko & Medicine for the People and , Rising Appalachia. We were blessed to have reached roughly 25,000 people this year between performances and workshops that we self-organized. This brings us to31 National & International tours booked 100% independently!

In the largest demonstration of community support we have ever received, we were able to fully fund the cost of producing our forthcoming record! THANK YOU for helping us make this incredible dream come true!

INTRINSIC is well on the way. The album is mixed and mastered and we are now creating beautiful music videos and booking a national tour to share it with you and the world!

Yup,we are putting out 4 new music videos between now and theINTRINSIC record release! We have been working hard with incredible teams in North Carolina (Three Flames Productions) and New York(Ghetto Film School), as well as directing, filming and editing much of the work ourselves! This has been an exciting process of bringing our community deep into the journey and finding new ways of expressing our art and visions for justice.

This year brought us closer to some of our favorite people roaming this expansive world.

From being on set for the new Nina Simone short directed by and starring ADEPERO ODUYE (lead of Pariah and co-star in 12 Years a Slave) to receiving the Bioneers award next to EVE ENSLER (playwright, performer, author of The Vagina Monologue, & founder of V-Day and One Billion Rising), we were struck by all the incredible and varied places the universe brought us to. We were also honored besides MAYUMI ODA a world-renowned sublime artist, often called “the Matisse of Japan,” and deeply committed anti-nuclear activist who founded of Plutonium Free Future in 1992, and EARTH GUARDIANS, an international youth climate activist network who just won a major victory in the climate lawsuit they brought forth against the U.S. government. Their casewill be seen in Federal Court. This is going to be a trial of our lifetimes! We also got to kick it with SIEDAH GARRETT, writer of Man in the Mirror made famous by Michael Jackson, DALLLAS & THOMAS GOLDTOOTH, life-long activist and current front line organizers at Standing Rock, and Actor/ActivistROSARIO DAWSON.

We were honored this year with 3 incredible monetary awards by the Threshold Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and the Geo Family Foundation, as well as being awarded the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta for work we will do in 2017. With their incredible and generous support we have been and will continue to be able to accomplish so many of the things outlined here and beyond.

This is the first time in our 14-year career that

such an incredible outpour of financial

support

has

come our way.

We are humbled and enriched by other’s convictions that our work is important and should be sustainable. We were also honored with three incredible Artist/Activist Residencies at Omega Institute, The Center For Whole Communities, and SPACE on Ryder Farm. To top it all off, at Omega Institute

our residency was sandwiched between Thich Nhat Hanh and Eckhart Tolle. We were housed in the same place they had just been and were about to rest and dream!

We are beyond grateful for the profound blessings of 2016, and the incredible ways our deepest passion and devotion was given meaning. We are grateful to be alive with you in this time of great shifting, that calls us all to our highest potential to wage love and spin this world into balance. We cherish you, and can’t wait to dance, march, sing, dream, and build boldly with you into 2017!